Too cold today for a ride, just upper 40's, but a good day to take Keiko into the hills above Centerville. She knows the trails from Bruce taking her up there last year. The hour plus hike was good exercise for both of us.
I brought back a nice sample of gneiss from the Farmington formation that extends along the entire Wasatch front, though it is most prominent up, of all places, Farmington Canyon. For all my years as a kid I had no idea what this striated black and white rock was, so prevalent in the mountains above our house, until I went through the visitor's center recently on Isla de Venado, (Antelope Island).
It is generally alternating layers of mica, (dark) and quartz, (light), and is between 2 and 3 billion years old. This is way older than dinosaurs and as far as paleontologists know only single cell stromatolites lived on the earth then. We have fossils from these simple cyanobacteria around the Great Salt Lake. We really live in an old portion of the world. Who can say they have gneiss in their backyard or proximity to stromatolite fossils? Keiko doesn't care. She was interested in the things of a dog's world but also hiking with me in the mountains. A good time was had by both of us. It was good exercise too. Tomorrow it is a metric century to that aforementioned island, work or other matters pending.
